The Sovereign-V2: C48: Ghosts at the Gate
Corvin stood like a statue carved from the darkness itself. Utterly still. Utterly silent. The resonant thrum of his ring shifted frequency, a subtle counter harmony to the wet, squelching sounds emanating from the walls. His eyes, fixed on the impenetrable blackness, weren’t seeing the runes; they were absorbing data streams of pure shadow, listening to the silence itself, to the agonized screams of the ancient wards as they shattered. He heard the mountain’s stone not as inert rock, but as a vast, groaning membrane stretched taut over a churning, primordial hunger. The whispers weren’t just shadows now; they were the mountain’s thoughts, ancient, slow, and ravenous. A language of grinding pressure, of tectonic thirst, of cold, patient consumption measured in eons. The scent of ozone and grave dirt wasn’t just atmosphere; it was the exhalation of a slumbering leviathan finally stirring. His ring thrummed, not vibrating, but resonating at a frequency below hearing, a subtle counterpoint to the mountain's fading tremor.
Then, figures coalesced from the writhing shadows, stepping forward as if born from the sickly yellow light itself.
Akuma materialized first, a wraith in obsidian plate outlined in the bilious glow. Frost swirled lazily around his armoured form, a miniature blizzard contained by his will. His star pupiled gaze swept over them, lingering on Shiro’s scarred hands and Kuro’s pulsing arm with cold, analytical hunger. Beside him stood Volrag, a pillar of glacial hate. His presence wasn’t just cold; it was an
absence
of warmth, a sucking void that leached vitality from the very air. His scarred face was impassive, but his eyes, chips of glacial ice, burned with a focused intensity, fixed solely on Ryota.
Behind them, stepping from deeper shadows like nightmares given form, came the ghosts.
For Corvin, it was a figure shrouded in shifting, fractal darkness. Not a man, but the
memory
of one, the first void entity he had failed to contain decades ago, a failure that had cost lives and carved a piece of his own humanity away. It had no distinct features, only a swirling vortex of absolute cold and gnawing hunger that mirrored the mountain’s own essence. A nameless horror, long buried, now exhumed by the plaza’s malice. Its mere presence caused Corvin’s ring to emit a low, warning thrum, a resonance of recognition and old, cold fury.
Haruto’s breath hitched, a microscopic fracture in his usual implacable calm. Stepping into the yellow light was a woman, her features sharp and familiar beneath a cascade of greying hair tied in a severe knot. Commander Yumi Isamu. His father’s most trusted advisor, the architect of the Isamu house’s tactical doctrine, the doctrine Haruto had perfected. The woman who had smiled as she signed the order condemning his father for "strategic instability" during the Frostguard’s internal purges. She stood there, pristine in her old Isamu uniform, untouched by time or decay, but her eyes were voids filled with the same sickly yellow light as the runes. A ghost that spat on his father’s grave and on the very concept of loyalty Haruto had built his life upon. Her lips curved in a silent, mocking echo of his father’s final, betrayed look.
Juro froze. The figure before him wasn’t a specter of darkness or betrayal, but a memory clad in the torn, blood stained finery of House Fujiwara. Lord Takeshi Fujiwara. Not the scarred monster Juro remembered cutting down in a duel fuelled by exposed treachery, but the man as he was
before
, Juro’s sworn brother, his confidant, the one whose betrayal had shattered Juro’s faith and forged his flint hard isolation. Takeshi’s face was unmarred, handsome, his expression one of profound sorrow. But the yellow light bled from his eyes, and the wounds Juro had inflicted, wounds he
knew
he’d dealt, were visible beneath the fine silk: the punctured lung, the severed artery. A scarred visage that was a lie, a cruel reminder that the brotherhood he’d cherished had been a poisoned well from the start.
Just fucking lies.
Ryota Veyne stepped forward, placing himself between the emerging horrors and his shattered team. His Polaris eyes burned with a contained supernova of fury, but it was directed solely at Volrag. "Volrag," Ryota's voice was a low rumble, like grinding tectonic plates. "You crawled from the shadows. Finally." The history between them was a frozen river beneath the words, mentor and protege, commander and lieutenant, until ambition curdled into envy, and envy into glacial hate. Volrag, forever in Ryota's shadow, had chosen to extinguish the light rather than share it.
Mira stood slightly behind Ryota, pressed against a grotesque, weeping statue carved from black ice. Her fractured lens pulsed erratically, casting jagged shards of violet and sickly yellow light across her terrified face. Her visible eye was wide, darting between the ghosts, the runes, the sheer, overwhelming malice saturating the plaza. She saw paths fracturing, futures collapsing into gnawing darkness, the weight of the mountain’s hunger pressing down on her fragile psyche. Her crow, was a silent, trembling lump on her shoulder, feathers puffed out in primal fear.
Akuma’s cold, mocking laugh cut through the oppressive silence, sharp as a shard of ice. “You’ve made it this far, guttering sparks. Dragged yourselves from your little tomb, trailing ashes and defiance.” His star pupiled gaze swept over them, lingering on Shiro’s trembling hands, Kuro’s pulsing corruption, Corvin’s unnerving stillness. “Admirable, in a pathetic, insectile way. But the mountain’s heart is awake. It has slumbered for millennia, dreaming of stars and the sweet decay of hope. And now… it
hungers
.” He took a step forward, the frost around him crackling. “And I? I have been waiting. Patiently. For the main course.”
Volrag’s voice was a low, guttural grind, like stone shearing against stone. His glacial eyes never left Ryota. “We don’t want to get blood on the inside of the plaza, Veyne.” He gestured with a gauntleted hand towards the vast, shadowed space beyond the archway they stood within, the true expanse of the Plaza of Screams, barely visible in the pulsing rune light. “Too much money spent on renovation.” A flicker of that old, bitter resentment twisted his scarred lips. “Plus… you’re not worth the fucking effort of scrubbing stones.” He raised his chin, a challenge carved in ice. “Step outside. Face your fate. Especially you, Ryota Veyne. Time to see if the old star still burns… or just crumbles to fucking ash.”
Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be ed if seen on Amazon.
Shiro’s grip on the dead ward stone was white knuckled. The grinding agony in his wrists was a continuous scream, the phantom thorns tearing deeper with every ragged breath. He tried to summon a spark, anything, to his Polaris scarred palm. Agony detonated. It wasn't the controlled heat of the Sky Hearth; it was raw, unfiltered stellar fury tearing back up the conduit of his ruined nerves. Nerve flaying shards of white hot pain lanced from his palm to his spine, blinding him, stealing his breath. He choked back a scream, doubling over, vision swimming with supernovae of agony.
Control the fire!
Haruto's voice, cold and precise, sliced through the white noise of pain.
Focus on the angle, not the scream!
He forced himself upright, breathing through the fire, the dead stone pressed against his chest like a shield that offered no protection. The cost of his power was etched in every nerve ending, a brutal counterpoint to Volrag's dismissive words.
Kuro felt Shiro's agony like a blow to his own core. The static roared, the cold fire flared, chewing deeper towards his heart. He saw his monstrous shadow again, reflected in the hungry gaze of the mountain.
Feed us.
The voice of his father and the void intertwined. But beneath the horror, beneath the consuming pain, a cold ember of defiance sparked , the ember rekindled in the crypt's forge.
Precision is the antidote.
He wouldn't feed the mountain. He would
make
it choke. He forced his corrupted arm to his side, not hiding it, but acknowledging it. A weapon. Flawed. Dangerous. But his. He met Volrag’s glacial stare with his own storm grey eyes, burning with a resolve forged in absolute zero. "Let's go," he rasped, the static crackling around the words. "This tomb stinks."
Corvin’s hood tilted minutely, his unseen gaze analysing the runes, the ghosts, the shifting architecture. His ring thrummed, a constant, resonant counterpoint to the plaza's growing malice. He saw the runes not as mere markings, but as conduits, capillaries pumping the mountain's ancient hunger into the very stone. The Plaza wasn't a place; it was an organ. A digestive tract. He gave a single, precise nod. The path forward was annihilation. But annihilation required positioning. He moved, a silent shadow flowing towards the archway.
One by one, they moved, Shiro fighting the white hot agony with every step, Kuro compensating for the dead drag of corruption, Corvin a study in lethal stillness, Ryota a bastion of contained fury. Mira flinched as they passed, the crow letting out a soft, terrified croak. Haruto’s gaze was locked on the ghost of Yumi Isamu, his face a mask of analytical ice, but the knuckles of his clenched fists were white. Juro’s eyes, flint hard, never left the sorrowful, bleeding visage of Takeshi Fujiwara, the lie that had shaped his solitude.
As they passed under the massive, rune encrusted archway, the Plaza of Screams opened before them, and the true horror dawned.
It wasn't just vast; it was
alive
. The floor wasn't stone; it felt like frozen flesh beneath their boots, yielding slightly, unnervingly resilient. Towering pillars, carved to resemble twisted, agonized figures frozen mid scream, wept viscous black ichor that pooled on the "ground," steaming faintly before being absorbed. The source of the sickly yellow light was revealed: colossal, pulsing runes
embedded
in the very substance of the plaza, throbbing like diseased hearts set deep within walls that seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with a slow, peristaltic rhythm. High above, the vaulted ceiling was lost in swirling, inky darkness, but occasionally, vast, stalactite like formations of black ice would gleam with internal, malevolent light, dripping freezing condensate that hissed where it struck the living floor.
The air was thicker here, heavier, saturated with the coppery fungal stench of the mountain's breath. It pressed down, a physical weight that made breathing laborious. The silence of the chamber was gone, replaced by a low, omnipresent
hum
, the sound of the mountain digesting anticipation. And beneath it, woven into the very fabric of the place, were the echoes. Not just of ancient screams, but of
their
fears,
their
failures, amplified and twisted by the sentient stone: the wet rattle of Aki’s dying breath, the crunch of Kuro’s ribs under Akuma’s boot, the sizzle of Shiro’s nerves overloading, the cold, final pronouncement of Corvin’s assumption, the shattering of glass that marked Mira's breaking point, the wet tear of flesh as Juro struck down his brother, the dry crackle of Haruto's father's pyre.
Akuma, Volrag, and their ghostly entourage fanned out, blocking the only other visible exit, a towering gate of black ice sealed with chains thicker than a man's torso. Akuma spread his arms, embracing the suffocating atmosphere. "Behold! The antechamber of oblivion! The mountain's welcoming embrace!" His voice echoed strangely, absorbed and amplified by the living stone. "Make yourselves comfortable, sparks. Your light… will be extinguished today."
Volrag took another step forward, his focus solely on Ryota, his hand resting on the hilt of the massive frost forged great sword strapped to his back. The air between them crackled with decades of betrayal and glacial hate. "No more shadows, Veyne," Volrag growled, the sound like grinding glaciers. "Just you. Me. And the cold truth." He drew the blade with a sound like a mountain splitting. Frost exploded outwards, crawling across the fleshy floor towards Ryota. "Your time fucking ends here ONCE AND FOR ALL."
Shiro braced himself, the dead ward stone cold against his palm, the agony in his wrists a brutal metronome counting down the moments until he’d have to unleash the fire again. Kuro shifted his weight, compensating for the drag, the static a rising tide in his mind, the cold fire in his arm pulsing in sync with the diseased runes.
Precision. Control.
Corvin’s ring thrummed louder, a scalpel being honed in the face of the abyss. The ghosts watched, silent, hungry. The Plaza of Screams held its breath, a predator savouring the fear of its prey before the feast began. The mountain was awake. The ancient wards were shattered. Akuma's trap was sprung, Volrag's count complete. They stood in the belly of the beast.
And it was ready to feast.
.
!
V2: C48: Ghosts at the Gate
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